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TIL: AWS is only expensive if your time has no value. Article neglected to add the cost of labour for setup (edit: aside of racking), maintenance (security upda
by Rantenki 6y ago
TIL: AWS is only expensive if your time has no value.
Article neglected to add the cost of labour for setup (edit: aside of racking), maintenance (security updates on infrastructure, etc), and disaster response.
It also missed the cost of downtime based on projected MTTR for a failure. The word "fail" only appears once in the page, and not in regards to recovery, only preventative replacement.
It's absolutely true that colo is cheaper than AWS for projects that can absorb the labour and failure related costs, but that usually is only true for hobby or very small business services.
- riku_iki 6y agoIt also depends on how computationally intensive your application is, AWS premium can be higher than labor cost if you need large scale data crunching.
- Rantenki 6y agoThat's definitely true. It still makes sense to run your own AI/ML servers on-prem if you're saturating some $20k/each GPU boxes, for example. But ... most web applications are still IO bound, and labour is surprisingly expensive.
- heipei 6y agoOr if you need to egress a lot of data to the Internet. Or send a lot of data between different AZs. Or between Regions. Or anywhere really. Plus now you have to get a PhD in AWS Billing first: https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1155838435065655296/photo/1 https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1155838435065655296/pho... and https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1172239124251709449/photo/1 https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1172239124251709449/pho...
- shiftpgdn 6y agoDo you actually use AWS or are you just parroting something you've read? Do you understand that with AWS you still have to setup instances, manage security updates, permission and deal with disaster response (US-East-1 outage?) If you've run anything at any scale for any length of time you'll know that EC2 hosts frequently get rebooted with short notice.
- Rantenki 6y agoI have extensive infrastructure running across 3 separate org accounts for blast radius, with multiple separate VPCs per org, RDS databases across multiple AZs, and a large variety of instances. Everything is built up and torn down via Terraform, and ZERO maintenance tasks are done via the console. Changes to infrastructure configuration are managed via CAB which approves PRs on Github which are automatically deployed via TF cloud. We do monthly disaster simulations where we replace a _production_ environment. I'll agree that AWS paints a very rosy picture of their own services, but there is substance underneath that PR.
- ProAm 6y agoWe see just as much downtown with AWS with DR/HA/MTTR as with colo. You still have to set it all up and maintain it, its just different setup and maintenance than if you actually have a servers in DCs. Most people still have the learning curve with AWS and usually do it incorrectly, or have to wait for Amazon to admit degradation of a service is occurring. It's really a matter of who within the company wants to know whats behind the curtain. I'd almost always vote for self hosting but its a hard argument internally when everyone thinks the cloud eliminates these issues magically.
- outworlder 6y ago> or have to wait for Amazon to admit degradation of a service is occurring. Please compare apples to apples. If you are comparing to colo, I don't know of any colocation facilities which provide higher level services (say, Kinesis). They might provide some features like CDNs, but nothing very fancy. You are left with a EC2 vs servers racked in some colocation facility comparison. At that point, it's not even fair. I can run a terraform script and spin up a copy of the production environment in minutes. I don't have to create purchase orders and wait for hardware. I don't have to issue tickets. If any machine goes down it can be recovered in minutes, and it will spin up in another hypervisor, maybe even a different datacenter. You don't have to spend time and resources with discussions on how the 'network topology' is going to look like, and then send people off to implement and wire up stuff. You don't have to spend cycles diagnosing issues just to find out that there's a bad transceiver in a NIC somewhere. YOU DONT CARE. AWS cares and, even if they can't find an issue, stop/start, new hardware in minutes. You cannot compare the two in good faith. Sure, it might make sense to host some workloads in a colo, but you are giving up a lot.
- z92 6y agoHe did, Quote : We are going to say we used four hours of labor. This includes drive time to the primary data center. Since it is far away (18-20 minute drive), we actually did not go there for several quarters. So over 32 months, we had budgeted $640 for remote hands. We effectively either paid $160/ hr or paid less than that even rounding up to four hours.
- Rantenki 6y agoRead those figures again. They're such an underestimate as to be laughable, and apply only to the physical racking efforts. There is no way in the world that the only effort taken related to infrastructure is entirely encapsulated in ~ $200 per year.
- Patrick-STH 6y ago100%. We had 11 months where nobody touched the racks as an example and the visit 11 months later was the one to physically get a tool I had left there. I mentioned I even track drive time.
- joshuamorton 6y agoHow much time did you spend deciding which components to upgrade and purchasing parts to later install? How much would you charge a client for that time?
- Patrick-STH 6y agoVery little, but that is probably because we cover the server industry in-depth with reviews and such. I mentioned a bit that that knowledge is key. This is our cost analysis and not going to be the same for everyone.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoFor a business with growing needs (most people at the point of making the decision), won't they need to go to install more hardware frequently, if nothing else?
- rootsudo 6y agoVery true, Running something on the open Internet is super annoying. If you properly subnet, or restrict to VPN, I can see it as useful but then you have a whole other host of problems to conquer. If you're doing a static page or such, no issue, but the second you're hosting a webapp or need to have a database, yeah.
- mekster 6y agoWhen you're uninformed and don't know what you're facing, things seem complicated and cloud solutions tend to look very attractive but what is so hard about running a web app? For sake, just spin up a single server somewhere cheaper and run it all in there and vertically scale up after you've put the appropriate monitoring to know when you need to scale up. And put your money where it's worth it.
- therealx 6y agoI agree with you. As counterpoint, I was embarassed for our profession when something like 70% of people in the industry said they were confused with the syntax for httpd.conf
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- emperor_ 6y agoThe labor was added in this calculation with data from the last 3 years. It's a lot less then one might think.
- johnklos 6y agoThis is SO myopic. You think bad things don't happen on AWS? You think that an experienced admin isn't going to spend significantly more time trying to communicate with an actual human at Amazon than fixing a problem on a physically controlled server? This is incredibly naive.
- EdwardDiego 6y agoWe moved to AWS because bad things happen there less often than they were happening to us with various DC providers we used to use. I've never had AWS tell us that they can't find the server we're renting that suffered HDD failure. AWS has never cut us off from the Internet because a sysop typed a command in the wrong session. And we find AWS support to be far quicker to respond, and far more effective, than our previous providers. So, YMMV, but AWS is pretty damn good for our requirements.
- therealx 6y agoI agree with you, but I can't find a good way to communicate this to the other camp. I wonder if you can't clearly see this without having been a "sysadmin" long before "devops" was a title.
- ldng 6y agoIt's just that they have a vested interest in not understanding or even acknowledge your arguments. Scalability is the thing and AWS its Viagra. Whoever has the biggest scalability get to pat itself in the back.
- pensatoio 6y agoIt's both myopic and naive to assume there's a binary set of circumstances that lend an upper hand to self-hosting or cloud hosting. It's a sliding scale. What makes you money? What's your expected growth? What are your security needs? What experience does your team have? In this thread, people at each end of the scale are 1. conflating different use cases (wordpress is not the same as a massive, scaled data ingest pipeline) and 2. are ignoring the hidden costs of both.
- smnrchrds 6y ago> TIL: AWS is only expensive if your time has no value. Is it only expensive if developer time is free or if it is, let's say, a quarter of a typical Bay Area senior engineer? Salary levels are vary quite a lot across the world, even looking only at developed countries. At what $/hr level does managing your infrastructure become more cost-effective?
- chmod775 6y agoRunning my site on dedicated servers costs me $500 a month, running it on AWS would cost me about $20,000 a month (probably just for the egress traffic alone). I could hire four system administrators for that money to look after each of my four dedicated servers full time. On top of that you first need to learn AWS. That thing is complicated - but I can set up a dedicated server in minutes because it's indistinguishable from my development environment. I joke that dedicated servers are only expensive if your time and money are worthless. Because AWS is going to eat both.
- pensatoio 6y agoDespite the naysayers, you're completely correct. The effort required to build and maintain AWS is so much lower than on-prem. The only time this isn't true is when you have highly optimized, calculated needs where investing in that specialized infrastructure will pay off. I want my team focused on building stuff that makes us money.
- tluyben2 6y ago> very small business services Which accounts for almost all hosting and startups. Most startups will never see more than a handful of users and yet microservices, lamdba, nosql etc must be deployed because ‘scaling and failover’, wasting their own and investers’ money for nothing. Only a small % will ever need any scaling and failover. If aws were truly cheaper, we would be using it for everything; currently we mix which is far cheaper. Anything not fail critical that benefits from fixed price cpu/gpu, bandwidth and storage we host traditionally. We and our clients saved fortunes over the years. And for clients or projects that do not need such heavy lifting as aws, we simply host traditionally completely.
- brtkdotse 6y agoI agree. I’m a contractor and my client is running Azure. Having the possibility to snap my fingers and have a Redis cache appear ready to go is a no brainer - it costs per month what I cost per hour.